Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Priscilla spent that first spring at Graceland as she had her freshman year in Germany: schoolgirl by day and Elvis’s femme fatale once she pulled her little red Corvair into the driveway. She would sneak in at noon, Alan Fortas remembered, because she was embarrassed to have the guys see her in her school uniform, and she’d disappear upstairs to change into something suitably sultry for Elvis, who was often still asleep. Priscilla kept up a grueling pace the last seven weeks of her senior year, staying up until five or six in the morning with Elvis and the entourage at the Memphian Theatre or the Rainbow Roller Skating Rink or the fairgrounds, then getting up at eight to drive to high school and face the nuns at Immaculate Conception, fortified by diet pills and Dexedrine furnished by her rock-star lover. Hidden inside her purse, recalled Joe Esposito, was “a little twenty-five-caliber automatic. Elvis told her to carry it.”
“She was living the kind of life we
thought
was neat,” recalled a classmate. “We didn’t have a clue that drugs were involved, and sex. You have to realize, drugs did not exist for anyone other than indigent people at that time.” In retrospect, Sister Rose Marie wished she had looked into the situation more closely. “I regret it now, to tell you the truth,” she admitted. “But things were different in those days and … what transpired after school hours I felt wasn’t my business.” Dee Presley, who later became outspoken and at times outrageous in her comments on the Presleys and the Beaulieus, called Priscilla “a victim of circumstances—really, child abuse.”
Ann Dickey, a cheerleader who considered herself “as close to a friend as anybody she had there,” regarded Priscilla as “kind of overwhelmed. We knew she was [Elvis’s] girlfriend. And we knew she was living with him, and we knew she stayed out all night. She would come to school, having been awake all
night long. Course, as a child, you aren’t in control of your life anyway. She didn’t have an option about going out and staying out all night.… That was her job.” Priscilla told Ann she wanted to become a model. “I’m five-five,” Ann said, “and she’s shorter than I am, and I was thinking, ‘And she wants to model?’ ”
Ann saw Priscilla as “a really sweet girl,” trying gamely to fit in. “I always felt kind of sorry for her, because most of us had gone to school together since grade school.” Priscilla, Ann noticed, “was very careful” about what she revealed about Elvis, even to Ann, which added to her isolation. “She gave the impression that he wanted her to be very private about what they did together.… She just had a very strange life. She dealt with it very well.”
Joan Esposito recollected that Elvis was concerned that people might misconstrue his relationship with Priscilla, which he regarded as sacred and special, if they knew she was living with him. “Elvis was a God-fearing southern gentleman.… He served in the army. He knew that he had an image to protect—like the sports figures today. If people are following you, you should be [discreet]. People loved him and he was a genuinely nice person, so he didn’t want to destroy that.”
The truth that was being denied was that Priscilla was in fact still a child, despite her sexual precocity and adult beauty. When Elvis was away, she often spent the afternoon with Dee’s three young sons—David, Billy, and Ricky Stanley—playing tag or hide-and-seek. The Stanley brothers were living their own fairy tale at Graceland. While Dee and their natural father were having marital problems, the three boys had been placed in a foster home. Dee reclaimed them when she married Vernon Presley. David, Billy, and Ricky Stanley were removed from foster care and driven to the gates of Graceland, where they were introduced to their new half brother, rock star Elvis Presley. Though Elvis had little affection for Dee and resented his father for remarrying so soon after Gladys Presley’s death, he filled the backyard at Graceland with toys and bikes for the boys. “I had pretty much made up my mind I’m not letting him [Elvis] in my life, ’cause I hadn’t got over my parents’ divorce,” recalled Ricky, “and he looks at me and says, ‘I’ve always wanted a little brother, so now I have three.’ And I thought to myself this was without question the most hip human being I had ever met.” For Dee’s three young sons, it was instant hero worship. “Elvis was kind
of a hip dad to me,” Ricky explained. “Not like a brother—he’s nineteen years older—so it’s like I’ve got the coolest father figure in the world here.” The Stanley brothers, who were between seven and eleven years old, considered Priscilla their peer and taunted her mercilessly about her heavy eye makeup and teased black hair, calling her Lady Dracula. Once Elvis was home, however, she became Lolita again.
One aspect of her bizarre double life came to a close on Wednesday, May 29, 1963, when Priscilla Beaulieu finally graduated from high school five days after her birthday. She was only eighteen years old, but she had experienced more, in her compressed four-year adolescence, than some adults do in a lifetime. Priscilla and Elvis earned the respect of the Catholic faculty by deciding that Elvis remain outside the Church of the Immaculate Conception during the 8:00
P.M.
graduation ceremony to avoid turning the graduation into a spectacle. “I really appreciated his sensitivity,” acknowledged Sister Mary Adrian. “Not taking from the presence of the girls who were graduating. But I think the girls were a little disappointed!”
Apart from a summer electrical storm that blacked out the city, delaying the ceremony an hour, Priscilla’s commencement proceeded with solemn dignity. She was dressed, like the angel Elvis first compared her to, in a flowing white silk graduation gown, “and she was beautiful, of course,” said Sister Rose Marie. “With her dark hair and all, against the white cap and gown, she was just exquisite.” Priscilla walked down the aisle of the church as her name was announced, “and everybody was whispering, ‘That’s her,’ ” recalled fellow graduate Theresa Giannini. “You could hear the whispers of ‘She’s the one.’ ” When Priscilla reached the altar, she performed the graduation ritual, kneeling to kiss the ring of Monsignor Merlin Kearney, who handed Priscilla her diploma, then moved the tassel to the other side of her cap to signify that she had graduated from high school.
The instant the last girl’s name was called, students, parents, and nuns raced out of the church and across the street, where Elvis Presley was leaning against a black limousine waiting for Priscilla. He patiently signed autographs, recalled Sister Rose Marie, who found the rock-and-roll star “cordial and courteous and a gentleman.”
Missing from the crowd of well-wishers were Paul and Ann Beaulieu, who would fly from Germany to the United States just two weeks later to transfer to Travis Air Force Base outside
Sacramento. Their absence surprised Sister Mary Adrian, who found it odd that Priscilla’s parents had never contacted her about their daughter’s schooling. Elvis was in fact more like the proud father, beaming at his daughter on her graduation from high school, giving Priscilla a congratulatory party afterward at Graceland.
At H. H. Arnold, Priscilla Beaulieu was named, in absentia, the Best Looking Senior in the class she was a part of for all but nine weeks of her four years of high school. The graduation ceremony was held in the same Wiesbaden theater where
Love Me Tender
, Elvis’s first movie, was shown.
Priscilla’s goal, now that she had been released from the bondage of high school, was to acquire a “Mrs.” next to the name Elvis Presley. She was both driven and desperate, willing to do anything Elvis bid of her to make it happen. “A young girl fearing that if I didn’t do it,” she said later, “maybe someone would take my place … and I wanted to be the one.”
I
mmediately following her graduation from Immaculate Conception, Priscilla shared a golden interlude with Elvis. For thirty brief but glorious days, she enjoyed the undivided attention of her sex-symbol boyfriend without the distraction of a movie, an album, or his entourage.
They spent much of their time in Elvis’s blackened bedroom on the second floor of Graceland, sequestered for days at a time. Elvis loved the intimacy and privacy of these long intervals, which Priscilla referred to as “cocooning.” He kept the master bedroom suite frigid and the draperies closed day and night, for he preferred the darkness, opening the door only to receive meals. Inside this private sanctuary, Priscilla and Elvis played like children, listening to music, having pillow fights. When they emerged for brief spells, Elvis organized shooting contests in the back pasture or go-cart races down the winding driveway from the street to the mansion, as if Graceland were his private amusement park. Priscilla, by all accounts, played as hard as Elvis, throwing herself into his childlike diversions.
This idyll ended on July 1, 1963, when Elvis left for the West Coast to begin his next film,
Viva Las Vegas.
Priscilla was expected to remain at Graceland while Elvis was shooting a picture—another of the rules, ostensibly devised to prevent Elvis
from becoming “distracted” but in practice designed to give him latitude to commingle with his costars. He was notorious for having flings with female members of the cast or crew of his movies and had even confessed a number of them to Priscilla while they were secreted in his bedroom at Graceland. In
Viva
, Elvis was cast opposite singer-dancer Ann-Margret, who was, in the words of a friend of Elvis’s, “sex personified.” Priscilla had a premonition that Elvis and Ann-Margret would have an affair, and she was skittish and unsettled about staying behind in Memphis.
She occupied some of her time at the house of Willie Jane Nichols, who raised poodles and had sold Elvis the apricot toy he gave Priscilla for Christmas. Gladys Presley had coaxed her best friend into the poodle business, because it seemed glamorous, proclaimed Willie. “Gladys dreamed of being a movie star when she was young. She learned to dance the Charleston, and she read books about it. And she said, ‘We’re going to get us a French poodle.’ ”
Priscilla took her dog, Honey, to Willie to be groomed, “and she got to coming over to the house because she loved the poodles. She loved little animals.” In her loneliness, Priscilla regarded Willie Jane as a mother confessor of a sort, even sneaking cigarettes at her house. “She always invited me to everything—the midnight shows at the Memphian and all. In fact, Priscilla would always say, ‘I consider you family.’ ”
Priscilla questioned Willie endlessly about Gladys Presley during their long afternoons together, picking her brain for clues that might help her understand what endeared his mother to Elvis so that she might appropriate them for herself. “I told her what high morals Gladys had, and she was eager to know. She was sincere in it, too.”
When she was home alone, recalled Dee, Priscilla “would go up in the attic at Graceland,” where Elvis had preserved his mother’s belongings, and try on Gladys’s dresses, as if wearing her clothes, absorbing her smell, might somehow merge Priscilla’s spirit with the mother Elvis so adored. She was experiencing a variation of the
Rebecca
theme: living in a house built for another woman, surrounded by her taste and influence, trying vainly to win the affection of a man who was in love with a memory, except that in Priscilla’s case it was Elvis’s mother, not a former wife. The image of Priscilla in the attic at Graceland
wearing Gladys’s clothes was poignant, almost tragic, but at the same time very revealing.
“There was some intimidation,” Joan Esposito said, speaking about Priscilla’s adjustment to life at Graceland, “but she has real inner strength and she is very determined. And she knew what it was going to take to stay there. She had the right intuition, she knew how to make him happy, and that was it. And I don’t mean this in a negative way:
She knew what her primary purpose was.
And as long as she was focused on how much it meant to her—what she had to do with her family, what she had to do to get there, what she had to give up—and she was gonna stay in this.”
Priscilla’s feminine intuition about Ann-Margret had, of course, been correct. Elvis and Ann, according to members of their retinues, had an immediate sexual electricity that crackled on the set and quickly developed into what was obviously a serious love affair. Priscilla had not been in Memphis for four months when she was put to her first and most acid test.
Ann began showing up at football games Elvis organized with actor Robert Conrad and other Hollywood stars at Beverly Glen Park. Visitors and Memphis Mafia members attested to her spending nights at Elvis’s rented house on Perugia, where he had returned after staying on Bellagio Road. “He loved Ann,” declared Patti Parry, who had a small part in
Viva
and was on the set throughout the shoot, “and when Ann came, the parties stopped again and I was the only girl again. He had the best time with Ann-Margret that I have ever seen with any woman. They were like two kids. They partied, they had a good time.” Like Elvis, the red-haired actress and dancer loved motorcycles, and the two took off on their bikes for long rides together in the canyons—just Elvis and Ann, no entourage. This was an increasingly rare occurrence for Elvis, who liked the camaraderie of his salaried band of good ol’ boys and felt more comfortable with them around. Even more unusual, he often picked Ann up himself rather than sending one of the guys. Patti considered them “soul mates.”
That concept was endlessly absorbing to Elvis, who was convinced that everyone had a twin soul, that those two souls were one on the “other side,” then were separated and later reunited on earth. One could tell if two people were soul mates, so the theory went, if they looked like each other. The idea of a twin soul had particular resonance for Elvis, who mourned his still-born
twin, Jesse Garon, and may have clung to the concept of a soul mate as a means of making himself somehow spiritually whole.
Ann-Margret fit almost spookily into Elvis’s metaphysical belief system and his growing intrigue with mirror images. In fact, she was known at the time—just after her breakthrough in
Bye Bye Birdie
—as the “female Elvis,” a high-voltage sex symbol who could sing, dance, and act. She described herself and Elvis, later, as “eerily similar.” In fact, Ann-Margret and Elvis actually physically resembled each other; their faces and bone structures were strikingly alike, down to the crooked half-smile. Ann was taken aback by this duality, later writing in her autobiography that “it was like discovering a long-lost relative.” Just as intriguingly, Ann bore a likeness to Priscilla. The Swedish star and the part-Norwegian eighteen-year-old both had pouty lips, pert noses, wide-set eyes, and heart-shaped faces; as Priscilla grew older, it often became difficult to distinguish her from Ann in certain photographs. They even sounded alike; Ann spoke in a breathy, sexy, baby voice that Priscilla was either born with or affected to emulate the actress, whose kittenish growl was her trademark. To complete the bizarre circle, “when Elvis first met Ann-Margret,” Debra Paget would later recount, “we had the same makeup person at the studio, and he used to tell me that my face and Ann-Margret’s face—our bone structure was exactly the same.” Debra also told of how, in a Vegas hotel in the seventies, her own parents once mistook her for Priscilla. The “twinning” theme seemed to dominate Elvis’s love life: Debra Paget’s mother and Elvis’s mother; Gladys Presley and Debra; Debra and Priscilla; Priscilla and Elvis; Elvis and Ann-Margret; Ann-Margret and Priscilla; Debra and Ann-Margret. These were the sorts of parallelisms Elvis found fascinating and could spend hours pondering.